PLUM CITY – JM Watkins Meats has put the finishing touches on its exponentially larger new facility at the corner of Highway 10 and County Road CC. They opened their doors to the public June 16 and filled the store to the brim with people during the June 21 grand opening celebration.

The USDA gave $1.5 million in grant funding to aid the construction of the facility. At the time, JM Watkins estimated the grant would allow them to create 16 new full-time jobs and serve 36 new producers.

In Plum City at the previous facility, they battled issues due to the smaller size and the layout not being designed as a meat locker. Now, they have a holding pen that can hold 35-40 beef, doubling their capacity. Owner Brandon Clare is happy to have spacious pens both for the animals and to make life easy on the producers doing the deliveries.

“The other building in Plum City was not set up to be a meat locker,” Clare said. “It was for 60-something years, so obviously it worked, but it wasn’t a good layout.”

The new facility has four rails to hold meat in one cooler and five in another, meaning one cooler has more rail space than the entirety of the previous facility. They have tripled to quadrupled the amount of rail space they have. According to Clare, it is perfectly designed to process meat efficiently and in an organized fashion.

They have a brand new smoker and have also retained the smoker from the original location.

“Everybody I talk to says you’ll never use this smoker after you get the new one started,” Clare said.

The processing area at the old location was about 12-by-18 feet, significantly smaller than the new area. Clare hopes having the extra elbow room and space to add new equipment if necessary speeds up the process a bit.

When Clare took over the multi-generation business, he said he was not going to change up the recipes that had been successful for so long but instead continue to innovate new products and flavors. He has held true to that word, and the success has allowed them to make the leap to the new facility.

“Exciting and scary,” Erin Clare said of opening the new facility. “We’re hoping to support more of the local farmers and grow the community.”

The new location is located at W2431 State Highway 10 in Maiden Rock. While they will miss being in the heart of Plum City, they hope the easy highway access will bring in passersby from all over the area.

“Even when people knew we were there, they wouldn’t just stop,” Brandon said. “In the first week, we’ve had a lot more traffic of people just stopping by that didn’t know we were here.”

While they loved being located in the heart of Plum City as well, Brandon said it was good to get some space so people do not have to see rendering trucks and other waste come out of the building on a daily basis.

A huge focus at Watkins Meats is on relationships with small farmers, giving them a place to market their product. Now, with the large store, they expect to have seasonal vegetables, cheese from Eau Galle cheese, pickles and sauerkraut from an Elmwood resident and jam from a Plum City resident.

“Support some of the local, extremely small businesses that are here and great and people don’t know about them,” Erin said.

They have a wall of producers inside the store, showcasing exactly where the food people are eating is coming from. Some of these farms get as small as five cows, like Oxheart Farm in Hager City where an estimated five-cow farm produces the milk sold by JM Watkins.

“It’s just supporting the little farms like that, and bigger farms too,” Brandon said. “Trying to get more local stuff.”